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Diminishing a person’s belief in free will leads to them feeling less like their true selves, according to recent research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. In a pair of studies, researchers from Texas A&M University manipulated people’s beliefs in free will to see how this would affect the subjects’ sense of authenticity, their sense of self.

Washington, DC - Contrary to a widely-held view in psychology and other fields of research, belief in free will appears to be unrelated to moral behavior. Social psychologist Damien Crone from the University of Melbourne and Philosophy professor Neil Levy of Macquarie University and the University of Oxford conducted a series of studies of 921 of people and found that a person’s moral behavior is not tied to their beliefs in free will. The results will appear in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science this month.